A History of the American People

All these threads began to come together in the early years of the 17th century. James I was
keen on colonization, provided it could be carried out without conflict with either Spain or
France. As in Elizabethan times, the method was for the crown to issue charters to companies of adventurers,' who risked their own money. The Ulster plantation, which began in earnest in 1606, absorbed most of the available resources, but the same year the Virginia Company was refounded with a new charter. It had a Plymouth-based northern sector, and a southern sector based on London. The Plymouth men settled Sagadahoc on the Kennebec River, but abandoned it in 1608. A related, Bristol-based company founded settlements in southwest Newfoundland two years later. Meanwhile the Londoners followed up the old Roanoke settlement by entering the Chesapeake Bay in 1607 and marking out a city they called Jamestown, after their sovereign, 40 miles up the Powhatan River, renamed the James too. The Jamestown settlement is of historic importance because it began the continuous English presence in North America. But as a colony it left much to be desired. This time, the men who ran the Virginia Company from London did not leave out the religious element, though they saw their divine purpose largely in terms of converting Indians. The company asserted that its object wasto preach and baptise into the Christian Religion and by propagation of the Gospell, to
recover out of the arms of the Divell, a number of poure and miserable soules, wrapt up into
death, in almost invincible ignorance.", The true benefits of colonization, wrote Sir George
Peckham in a pamphlet, would accrue to the natives,' brought by the settlersfrom falsehood to
truth, from darkness to light, from the highway of death to the path of life, from superstitious
idolatry to sincere Christianity, from the Devil to Christ, from Hell to Heaven.' He added: And if in respect of all the commodities [colonies] can yield us (were they many more) that they should but receive this only benefit of Christianity, they were more fully recompensed." There was also thehuman offal' argument. The New Britannia, published at the time of the
Jamestown foundation, justified it by urging that our land abounding with swarms of idle persons, which having no means of labor to relieve their misery, do likewise swarm in lewd and naughtie practises, so that if we seek not some ways for their foreign employment, we must supply shortly more prisons and corrections for their bad conditions. It is no new thing but most profitable for our state, to rid our multitudes of such who lie at home [inflicting on] the land pestilence and penury, and infecting one another with vice and villainy worse than the plague itself.' Converting Indians, getting rid of criminals and the idle poor-that was not a formula for a successful colony. The financing, however, was right: this was a speculative company investment, in which individuals put their cash into a joint stock to furnish and equip the expedition, and reinforce it. The crown had nothing to do with the money side to begin with. Over the years, this method of financing plantations turned out to be the best one and is one reason why the English colonies in America proved eventually so successful and created such a numerous and solidly based community: capitalism, financed by private individuals and the competitive money-market, was there from the start. At Jamestown, in return for their investment, each stockholder received l00 acres in fee simple (in effect perpetual freehold) for each share owned, and another -100 acres when the grant wasseated,' that is, actually taken up.
Each shareholder also received a `head right' of 50 acres for each man he transported and paid
for. That was the theory. But in practice the settlers, who were adventurers rather than farmers-
most were actually company employees-did not know how to make the most of their acres.
It was on May 6, 1607 that three ships of the Virginia Company, the Godspeed, the Discovery,
and the Sarah Constant, sighted the entrance to Chesapeake Bay. The settlers numbered 105, and